Ink drops

Some fun insights and grumbles from my week with inks. Sloshing around in this post are Noodler’s, J. Herbin and Troublemaker.

Inky fingers — I’ve recently come to the conclusion that it’s easier just to fill my cartridge converters using a syringe. Ink bottles vary so much that it’s often hard to insert the pen, and also it’s very difficult to see how much ink I’m using. For travel I have a Pineider pen filler, which also makes it easy, but naturally that’s really confined to one choice of ink.

Eternal darkness — Tomoe River paper may be all the rage for fountain pen lovers due to how it makes the ink look, but it’s not a friend for a Noodler’s bulletproof ink. After half an hour the page still hadn’t dried, so I won’t be trying that again.

Be careful what you wish for — over the summer Goulet Pens are having an ink sample sale, so I picked up several of those, including what has been my “grail ink” for a year, J. Herbin Amethyste de L’Oural. This is one of those fancy shimmer inks, which includes tiny silver particles that glitter a bit. For months I’ve marveled at the idea and anticipated the purple ink. Unfortunately, it turns out that I don’t really need sparkles, and the ink is just too light a shade for my taste. So a dream ended there. At least it ended cheaply!

Here comes trouble — one wrong turn isn’t going to discourage me though, apparently. Thanks to the Fountain Pen Companion podcast, I discovered Troublemaker Inks. I can think of a world of good reasons they’d call themselves that, and it definitely spelled trouble for me. They claim to have inks that shade into multiple colors! Once I’d seen they had one called Petrichor I was hooked. That’s the name of the smell you get when it’s just rained. The packaging looks beautiful, too. Oh and they’re selling samples of their entire lines for $10, so that was an obvious pick-up.